Apr 4, 2014

Swaggart preaches on atomic bombs

"I'm here to tell you tonight," Jimmy Swaggart says, in this classic bit of Pentecostal preaching, recorded for the radio, "that we've coming down to the end of time."

Swaggart, while making use of communications technology, here, talks about his fears about advancements in American weapons technology, connecting a promise that Jesus would return soon, before humans destroyed themselves:

This is apparently a pretty rare recording. Mark Betcher notes: "this recording was recorded at 16 RPM. 16 RPM was used for radio transcription discs. But 16 RPM commercial records were never widely available, although it was common to see new turntable models with a 16 RPM speed setting produced as late as the 1970s."

Daniel Silliman teaches American religion and culture at the University of Heidelberg. His research interests include American evangelicals and pentecostals, book history, atheism and secularity.

Silliman has a B.A. in philosophy from Hillsdale College and an M.A. in American Studies from the University of Tübingen. He is currently working on his doctoral dissertation at Heidelberg on the representations of belief in contemporary evangelical fiction.

He previously worked as a reporter for a metro Atlanta newspaper, where he wrote about crime.

Francis Schaeffer's 1982 message to the Presbyterians at Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., was pretty simple: the philosophy of modern society is humanism, and humanism means death.